William Mann charts the journey by which Kathy Hepburn of Hartford, Connecticut, became the star who dazzled audiences for decades in the company of such luminaries as Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and most memorably, Spencer Tracy, with whom she made nine movies and conducted a long off-screen romance.

Hepburn won her fourth Oscar aged 74 and across seventy years in the public eye, she was a cut above the usual screen queen. Now William Mann looks beyond the legend to consider apart the life and the persona of Katharine Hepburn, from her movies, her loves, her bisexuality and her extraordinary life in the golden age of film-making.